What you should know before moving Disaster Recovery to the cloud

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AUGUST, 2017

Why are enterprises, small businesses and even domestic users employing disaster recovery appliances and services? Cloud disaster recovery (DR) ensures high availability of the data, continuous flow of the process and provides a reliable recovery and failover.

So, all organizations or individuals who continuously need their data and require certain processes to progress without hindrances are adopting disaster recovery in the cloud. This is why disaster recovery plan has become necessary for any and all enterprises, small businesses and individuals dealing with data that they can’t afford to lose.

Business & Technical Drivers for disaster recovery in the cloud

The most apparent benefit is the reduction of the DR cost structure. This leads to better budget planning, leading to monetary benefits ranging up to even 50%; based on a comparison against traditional DR approaches. That’s two benefits compacted in one, reduction of infrastructure which leads to the reduction of costs. It enables you to gain access to more modern technology and remove aging technologies such as tape backup and the likes.

It’s beneficial to get rid of old technologies, due to their loopholes and issues. Latest technologies introduce compatibility to latest techniques, methods and processes used by the industry.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

A business continuity plan comprises of various applications requiring two types of applications or data: One that is accessed more frequently and the other that is accessed infrequently. Depending on your architecture, you will have applications that you need to run 24/7 while some you don’t need too frequent access to. A DR plan accommodates for both of these types of data by having high and low access frequency tiers. For example, Azure Cool blob storage and AWS S3 Infrequent Access, Azure hot blob storage or AWS S3.

Regardless of the access type, the protection for both is necessary; be it on-premise or on cloud. Another requirement for both these data types is that you will need them to be readily available. If you do desire to recover or failover, the transition should be smooth and speedy. This is what StoneFly’s disaster recovery services ensure. Your data is protected, always available and recoverable within minutes. So, business continuity is always assured.

How frequently do you access your data?

What you need to do before the transition to a disaster recovery plan is to analyze your data. Which type of data needs to be accessed more frequently compared to the other, the identification of data access frequency can help increase the cost efficiency of the overall process. You also need to observe the sensitivity of the data. Which data do you really need to operate and which kinds of data can you make-do without. This will also contribute to the overall cost efficiency by dictating the storage space.

It’s evident that you need technical knowledge of your data, therefore your technical teams play a crucial part. Another advisable thing to do is to seek the guidance of service providers and professionals who are more experienced with disaster recovery like StoneFly. You can book a demo or can contact a professional for guidance and learn how to distribute your data before making the transition.

Analyzing RTO & RPO of your data

There are two major factors involved in dictating the shape of your DR plan architecture: Recovery time objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO as the name implies, is the time taken to recover a particular object. Similarly, RPO means the point in time where you want a certain object to recover from. In other words, how much of the data loss can you tolerate pertaining to a specific data? For example, you may be able to endure data loss of 15 minutes in case of one operation or application but you may not be able to tolerate a single second of data loss in case of another.

These are the two things that govern the cost of your DR architecture plan. The speedier you want the recovery to be and the more data you wish to recover with the minimum amount of data loss, the more costly the plan will be. Again, the emphasis is on the analysis of the data. Before the transition, consultation and careful planning can save you from a ton of costs and trouble later on.

Classification of data based on failover

The vigorous analysis data will reveal that your data is distributed on a complex spectrum. For instance, back-end reporting systems and databases are something you may decide that you’re going to rebuild them when requested from an offsite backup because they’re only needed periodically and may not even be visible to clients. Similarly, you may have internal collaboration systems, which may be significant for customer services purposes hence you would want to make sure that they can be recovered quickly. Meanwhile, if you have customer transactional web applications, revue generating applications, then that may mean revenue loss and reputation damage. These applications would require automatic failover, hence using the hot configuration would be the best option for them.

StoneFly: The Utility, on demand data center

In conventional models of DR services, the entire data on your primary site is replicated on the secondary site; it may be a scaled down version but more or less it’s the exact same replica. With StoneFly, you get a very minimal DR provisioning running the entire time, just a small facility so that it receives storage snapshot data and still be able to scale up that DR facility if required. This implies that DR costs are reduced compared to traditional DR approaches.

This feature does not hinder your option to scale out when necessary. So basically, cost efficiency is emphasized while keeping in mind your convenience and potential needs.

StoneFly: Compliant & Trusted Service Provider

Enterprises that are complying with various industry standards require a similarly compliant and trusted service provider. In most cases, the industry standards demand that to be the case. StoneFly has acquired certifications and approvals from the following industry regulatory authorities:

Conclusion

Disaster recovery is necessary for any individual, enterprise, small business dealing with data they do not want to lose. DR ensures high availability while keeping the data safe and recoverable whenever needed. The transition to DR is not an all-or-nothing decision. It requires the identification and analysis of data based on the necessity of the recoverable data and the time taken to restore this data (RTO & RPO). Analysis of data reveals that data is spread across a complex spectrum dictated by the preference of the user.

StoneFly and its DR services are cost efficient and the best option for any individual seeking a reliable, trustworthy and secure way of ensuring their data is always available and recoverable. Even for entities that require certified service providers, their remains no better option than StoneFly.

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About StoneFly

StoneFly is a pioneer in the creation, development and deployment of the iSCSI storage protocol. Beginning with its registration of the iSCSI.com Internet domain name in March 1996, StoneFly has made iSCSI into a standard which is now used by IT professionals around the world.